


Who We Are

by NatashaBrown



Category: Dragon Quest Builders (Video Games)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:33:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25240189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NatashaBrown/pseuds/NatashaBrown
Summary: In which the Builder discovers Malroth, and Malroth learns all of the wrong lessons from their trip to Khrumbul Dun.
Relationships: Builder & Malroth (Dragon Quest Builders 2), Builder/Malroth (Dragon Quest Builders 2)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 34





	Who We Are

**Author's Note:**

> Courtesy notice: At the time this chapter was written I'd only mostly made it through Khrumbul Dun. Having come much further now, I've discovered why everyone hates Skellkatraz as much as they do, and I think I can fix it.

**Prologue**

The sea has the kind of smell that you taste at the same time, of gritty brine and fishguts and wet. I stood just beyond the reach of the surf, my back to the rising tide. There was something I had come to see, perhaps for the last time.

The ramshackle shelter I had put together from driftwood months ago was still standing, shoved in a corner below the overhang of a sheer cliff. Barnacles that had not been there before encrusted the second-hand ship’s door, and as I raised a gloved hand to touch it I heard my shadow-- his fast, heavy footfalls muffled by the soft sand.

“Can you believ--” the shoulder straight into my back took the breath out of my lungs and the door halfway off the hinges.  
  
“Can I believe that Lulu already wants to turn the site of our arrival into a narcissistic monument to the first founders? You lament that the island’s development is spiraling out of your control at a pace you didn’t anticipate?”

Malroth’s deadpan dissection of my emotional state was delivered with direct eye contact, which was a feat seeing as I was on my knees on top of the sharp splinters of the door he had just broken with my face. Reclined on the desiccated remains of one of the straw pallets, his attention was already drifting, back to the first moments where his memories were empty and everything was new.

Back when there was nothing to fear.

I asked if he was talking to the voice in his head again. The question earned me a glare through narrowed eyes. An elongated canine gleamed angrily through the curl of his lip. None of it was really directed at me, but this had interrupted the stolen peace returning to this site had offered, and he shot an arm out to pull me to my feet as he stood.

“I wanna get on the ship.”

And so we left the Isle of Awakening a second time, to find something else to worry about. With the wind in our favor, the docks shrank quickly from view.

“You can let go now, I can’t swim that far,” His smile returned, a wicked slice of white, and his hand fell away and came to rest on my shoulder instead. While I had been physically towed by my upper arm from the seaside shack to the raising of the anchor, I was never going to object to the new adventure. If he took our unspoken partnership for granted, it was because it was. I had gotten very accustomed to having my constant, mostly-helpful protector and companion over my shoulder.

He had begun as a lost thing that attached itself to my ambition. Took an instant shining to the breaking, and then to the building, although the latter had to be done from the sidelines.

In a bid to apprentice my eager friend, I had tried everything from detailed diagrams to literal hand-holding. But he’d swing too hard and cut too deep and skip the attention to detail that mattered. The failures were distressing in a way he could only show with rage, and for awhile after these attempts he would focus on what he did know instead.

And what Malroth did know was violent and wrathful and really not necessary when all I wanted was to shake an acorn out of a tree. I had a worrying sense that he had gradually learned restraint over the course of his time spent intently watching myself and the communities of humans we had come to know, and that his first casual suggestions of murdering Lulu were not the jokes I had taken them for.

“Humans” being the rest of us and not Malroth, because he was different in ways no one wanted to bring up to him in person. Some half-monster with tapered ears and razor teeth and the kind of eyes that you only expect to see coming at you while you’re alone in the woods in the dark of night.

Certainly not the animated fellow sitting across from you at dinner asking you what animal a tomato was and why everyone was eating bowls of grass.

But if you asked our Rosie, Pastor Al was all the evidence we needed that none of it mattered. In the moment before the fatal attack that took him from us was the proof of all the valor and conviction and love we didn’t use to believe our enemies knew anything about.

Among the many hands that had reached out to hold Alakazham’s as he breathed his last, Malroth’s had been one of them.

I think that was the moment that I had decided, whatever else my unusual partner was, in the ways it really counted there was nothing wrong with him at all.


End file.
